1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data transmissions over a network, and more particularly, to remote monitoring and control of articles over a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Remote monitoring of buildings or grounds is often done for security reasons. One conventional approach to remote monitoring of buildings and grounds uses a series of cameras position throughout the building and around the grounds. These cameras are then directly wired to a central monitoring location where a security guard sits and is able to view the images from the various cameras. By viewing the images at the central monitoring location, the security guard is able to detect a security breach when the images show an unauthorized person within the building or on the grounds. This conventional approach to remote monitoring is expensive to implement because specialized equipment and personnel are required. The central monitoring location is normally in a fixed location which is on-site or nearby.
Security systems, such as for a home, often protect the perimeter of the building along with one or more internal sensors. The internal sensors can, for example, include motion sensors, light beams, and the like. Cameras are not normally a part of a home security system. However, when cameras are provided, they generally operate to continuously record so as to presumably provide images of any intruders. Hence, the camera is a secondary part of the security system which does not actively participate in detecting an intruder. In any case, when the security system detects an intruder, an alarm is normally sounded and automatic telephone notification may be provided to the local police and/or a central office of a security company. Although, in most cases, no remote monitoring of the images provided by the camera is available, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,164,979 and 5,412,708 describe approaches which use telephone lines to send images off-site for safe archive or for remote monitoring.
Remote monitoring is also done for a variety of other purposes. As an example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,553,609 describes a remote visual monitoring system for in-home patient health care from a remote location via a telephone line.
WebCams have recently been use to provide remote viewing of various locations. For example, WebCams may be used to view traffic conditions, sea conditions, home locations, fish tanks, and many other things. However, the operation of these WebCams is problematic because of the high bandwidth requirements to transmit video from the camera serving as the WebCam and its server and viewers. The existing solution to limit the bandwidth utilization is to periodically transmit still images from a camera to an Internet server after a predetermined period of time. Then, for viewers of the images over the Internet, an Internet browser can access the still images from the Internet server and display the images on their computer system. Again, however, to limit bandwidth requirements, the Internet browser only periodically accesses (or receives by a push from) the Internet server to retrieve the newest images after a predetermined period of time. For example, the predetermined period of time between transmissions is generally selectable from a few options such as 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 1 minute, and 5 minutes. Although this conventional approach does limit the bandwidth utilization, the amount of bandwidth being utilized is nevertheless largely wasted when the image is not significantly changing.
Thus, there is a need for improved approaches to remotely monitor a location.